Paper short abstract:

In the US state of Louisiana, the fossil fuel industry maintains the spatial, environmental, and economic logic of colonialism and slavery. This presentation will posit legal and conceptual strategies to visualize and rupture Louisiana's 300-year extractive continuum.

Paper long abstract:

In the US state of Louisiana, the fossil fuel industry maintains the spatial, environmental, and economic logic of colonialism and slavery. Since 1926, oil and gas companies have dredged 10,000 miles of access canals to drill over 75,000 wells throughout the Mississippi River Delta. These canals usher saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico into freshwater wetlands, precipitating widespread vegetation death and sediment erosion. 1,900 square miles of wetlands have disintegrated at one of the fastest rates in the world, along with a critical buffer between coastal communities and the hurricanes and rising seas of the Gulf.

Louisiana's frontline communities are also at the fencelines of the nation's most polluting petrochemical plants, which occupy the footprints of sugarcane plantations in a region known as 'Cancer Alley'. An endemic yet uncharted feature of this wetland-plantation-plant landscape are mass graves of enslaved Africans. From the coast to Cancer Alley--from the well hole, through the pipeline, to the plant--one can traverse the self-contained yet disintegrating landscape of fossil fuel production.

A single parcel of private property contains the beginning and end of Extractivism. The well hole bored into Louisiana's ground is a wormhole. Primordial extinction events, colonial discovery doctrines, racial terror, and profit motives swell upward through geologic and atmospheric strata, rupturing into the present as oil geysers, human remains, carcinogenic emissions, microplastics, and free radical cells, and weeping against the horizon as climate change. This presentation will explore legal and conceptual strategies to visualize and rupture Louisiana's 300-year extractive continuum.